


goodnight, but never goodbye

by Anonymous



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: (sort of), Friends to Lovers, M/M, World of Ruin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 13:03:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16137812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: After Gralea Ignis helps keep the world running, eventually picks up hunting and cooking again, and talks to Gladio about Altissia.





	goodnight, but never goodbye

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Mostly Ignis character study, not a lot of story.  
> 2) So I asked and it seems it was never made clear how much Ignis actually told Gladio and Prompto about what went down in Altissia. In this they know the contents of the prophecy and that Ignis fought both Ravus and Ardyn for Noct, but not the details of how exactly he got injured.  
> 3) Title from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FClE1oJ3XOo&)

Sundown over Lestallum at the end of summer, the face of the clock tower has been replaced by a digital display showing military time. Daylight is retreating from the world far more rapidly than the approach of mild Lucian winter ordinarily brings, and the lengthening nights wrap Lestallum like a necromancer's life-draining fog.

The interim council heading the relief effort meets once every two days. Aranea and Loqi Tummelt are using the remains of their influence in Niflheim to hasten the evacuation efforts in Gralea. The Marshal rounds up the remains of the Crownsguard and Kingsglaive, the Hunters' Guild makes plans to regroup and relocate, and the survivors of Verstael's elite research division are in contact with representatives from the Accordo Protectorate regarding harnessing hydroelectric energy in Altissia.  

As part of his Citadel education Ignis had received training in emergency management and disaster recovery, and several weeks prior he had volunteered his services to the relief effort which had gladly welcomed it. Since arriving in Lestallum, some part of Ignis has been observing the flood of people in and out of the city, assessing and updating in real-time the council's models of the worst- and average- case scenarios. Statistics and history. He's studied this. How long food stocks and energy reserves will last, how long before fear takes hold like a plague and tears the city apart.

Another part of Ignis, the part he associates with the warmth of Noct's hands around his own on a bright summer day, believes in the people of Lucis. No matter the loss, people will always find a way to live with what they have left. One day in the uncertain future, they may also find a way to grieve.

Loqi asked Ignis, once, in a fit of anger at the end of a seven-hour roundtable on the logistics of transcontinental supply trains, how Ignis can stay so calm when the world is coming apart at the seams. "Perhaps I am more used to the darkness than you are," Ignis had replied.

And then came a night when the sun set on Eos and never rose again.

* * *

"I can't stay," Prompto says on the second day of the third week, the morning after his footsteps had sounded what seemed like all night on the concrete outside the EXINERIS workers' dormitory they had taken shelter in. They're seven to a room meant to house four, sleeping bags already lined end to end in the corridor outside, and people are still pouring in.

Prompto gives the practical reasons: he can fight and the Hunters still scouring the outer regions of Lucis for survivors need all the help they can get, Hammerhead has far less of an overcrowding problem than Lestallum currently does, and he's already talking to Cindy about helping out at the garage-turned-Hunter-base. But Ignis can tell there's something Prompto isn't saying;  Prompto thinks more than he lets on, and now Ignis also remembers that he doesn't like cramped spaces and never wanted to go anywhere Noct wasn't. Usually, Noctis would distract him with conversation or a game of King's Knight, but neither Ignis nor Gladio can read his moods nearly as well.

"You will always have a place here," Ignis says quietly, and Prompto makes a noise of assent. That evening he's out the door with only the clothes on his back, his weapons and ammunition, and the small duffel containing his personal possessions. When Ignis returns from his day's work, Gladio says Prompto had left a copy of the video card containing his photographs.

* * *

The telltale buzz of a phone on the table, the sound of Gladio moving to pick it up. "It's the Marshal. Asked if I knew anyone with a few days spare to head down to Cleigne."

The strategist in Ignis mentally maps the region, knows to give it up as lost. Another part of him remembers the click and whirr of Noct's fishing line at the Vesperpool, midday sun casting spots of light through thick foliage. "I know you want to go. Is there a reason you hesitate?"

For the past weeks Gladio has been pulling ten-hour supply runs with the Glaive between the Disc and EXINERIS, stockpiling meteorshards before the daylight runs out. Now Ignis registers the shift of fabric as Gladio transfers his weight. "What about you?"

"I have things to do here still, and I will be fine," Ignis says. Lestallum itself, inland and still illuminated by EXINERIS and the city lights, will be all right, but the outskirts of Lucis bear the full brunt of the onslaught of night. "You have no responsibilities to me. Go where you are needed."

As lifelong retainers to the crown their lives have never been their own, and now that Noct is no longer here, it falls to them protect and preserve the world their King left behind. Ignis gives Gladio the contact details of the hunters he knows are in the region, and tells Gladio to go for as long as he is needed.

A pause; the knowledge that he will not _stop_ being needed for a long, long time passes in silence between them. "All right," Gladio says, and departs that day.

* * *

Days turn to weeks turn to months of darkness and Ignis moves twice more, ending up in a cramped room on a first-floor apartment shared with two others, a few minutes' walk from the two-storey building that has become HQ to the interim council leading the continuing relief effort.

Prompto writes rarely;  Ignis gets news of him mostly by word of mouth from hunters who reach Lestallum via Hammerhead, where he's repairing and tuning weaponry for the hunters who drop in to resupply. Gladio has joined back up with his former Crownsguard section, now an honorary arm of the Glaive under the marshal, and stops in every so often when they pass through the city to deliver precious meteorshards to the power plant en route to Insomnia. Before, Noctis had centered them and kept them together, but now they had scattered like flyweights without an anchor,  each occupying a different roles in the world, kept busy by their own responsibilities.

Accustomed as Ignis has become to their presence, he is also used to being on his own. While he still lived in the Citadel work had occupied the majority of his time, so he had had few opportunities to meet children his own age aside from Noct, and as he grew older the burdens of his duties only increased. His responsibilities were niche, and with King Regis' own former advisor too far away to easily contact for advice Ignis had always had to figure out things on his own, including but not limited to how to get Noct out of bed on rainy mornings--

It is raining now, and even with the windows shut the storm is loud enough to drown out ambient noise. The interim council does not meet today, so Ignis is home, and the air indoors is stagnant and heavy. Ignis crosses to the window and pulls the pane open and immediately wind splatters his skin with rain, not unlike the tides had done on the altar in Altissia on that long-ago day.

Ignis shuts the rain out again, with it the wet and the roar of the wind. Gathers a few things together, and makes the trip down to the hunter's outpost by the overlook. The hunters passing through don't know who he is, but he holds out his dog tag on its slim silver chain, and they let him pass.

He has kept his spelldaggers sharp and now they still swing true, passing a hairsbreadth from the punching bags suspended from the ceiling and the wooden training dummies bolted to the floor at various points in the room. "Hey," his sparring partner says, and Ignis realizes that he's sent ice arcing down the blade and into the air. It hangs in the air, a jagged curve like a crystalline statue, taking up space where it does not belong.

"Sorry," Ignis says out of force of habit, and sends a skein of fire in its wake to melt it away. Restlessness splinters beneath his skin like the thrum of elemancy through his daggers, a spark waiting to catch a forest aflame.

* * *

The crisis situation around Lestallum has settled from response mode to management and maintenance, and now that the supply lines are stable and the Crownsguard-Kingsglaive are maintaining Lestallum's borders against encroaching daemons, the hours Ignis needs to put in at the relief effort are reduced. He only realizes a little more than a year has passed when he checks the timestamps on his last handwritten memos on his phone; he has not been tracking the days, and Lestallum's climate now is too mild to feel the passing of the seasons.

The former Crown City, now overrun with daemons and where the Accursed himself is rumored to sit, is still a black hole of resources, but the Glaives would rather withdraw their association with Lestallum altogether than abandon their outpost there. The council are still in contact with Accordo: a single supply route is maintained over the harsh ocean that is too rough for daemons to navigate, steel-reinforced boxes of cargo dropped at the abandoned quay for a single truck or boat to stop and pick up at their own time.

Ignis drops in at the hunters' building more often, begins picking up small local jobs before branching out further. Due to the rest of his work he still does not go very far from Lestallum, but Gladio sends him local leads through the hunters' network and sometimes Aranea or Iris will let him tag along on a longer foray.

On other days, Ignis takes a shift at one of the three soup kitchens in the city's former marketplace. It's a terrible waste of Crown City training, the owner had said on Ignis' second day, but Lestallum also has no need of gourmet chefs, only someone who can stretch ingredients as far as they will go. (A feat he's used to, Ignis thinks wryly, and remembers weeks on end of never knowing what ingredients Noct would pick up that day, if any at all, and having to work with it anyway.) He's adaptable and a quick study, and learns the layout of the kitchen as well as if it were his own.

* * *

Sometimes a hunt will send Ignis eastwards, and on those times he finds a pretext to drop in at the hunter's outpost in Hammerhead. Prompto's still there, repairing weapons and taking hunts in his downtime. The years have run down everyone Ignis knows, but Prompto wears it harder than most, once-cheery quips giving way to something quieter and rougher as they catch over thin broth and strips of preserved meat. "Best to just keep moving. Keeps you from thinking too much," he says, and Ignis agrees.

One of Ignis' ears is always plugged into his phone where a text-to-speech program reads his correspondence to him. These days, Ignis wakes, puts in his hours at the council building, picks up a shift at one food establishment or another, brings home leftovers for his housemates. Answers the messages from Camelia Claustra's aides, or composes another line of his reply to the five-thousand-word message Gladio had sent him a month ago. Sleeps, and rises the next day before the sun. It isn't as great a feat as it used to be.

_... only at the throne can the Chosen receive it, and only at the cost of a life: his own. The King of Kings shall be granted the power to banish the darkness, but the blood price must be paid._

On an island far out to sea, the King of Light sleeps beneath the starless night. One day he will rise again, and one day he will die, and bring light back to the world. But it is not yet that time, and until the sun rises again upon Eos, his kingdom cannot mourn. Ignis holds the prophecy in his heart and prays to the gods who have forsaken the world that one day, their wayward prince will remember to come home.

* * *

Gladio's convoy arrives in Lestallum ahead of schedule; the roads had been pleasantly absent of daemons, so they are making good time to Insomnia and can take three days' rest in the city instead of the usual one day. Ignis tells Gladio a good place to take his colleagues for dinner, says they can meet up later after Ignis' own shift at the soup kitchen is over. Later Ignis steps outside his kitchen to find Gladio already waiting, falls in step beside his friend as they head to the closest watering hole.

"You look well," Gladio says.

"I'd say the same," Ignis begins, "but..."

They both laugh, the ice broken. Over drinks Gladio tells him about the changes in Eos he sees on the road: accessible havens have been repurposed for emergency reserves in case a supply line gets disrupted. Elemental deposits still stud the high wilds, one of the few natural light sources left to Eos. "Pity I never studied elemancy. Could have brought some of it back."

"No flasks anyway," Ignis replies. Noct had all of theirs, and neither the materials nor the fine glass-crafting technique needed to make them could be found outside of Insomnia.

"Mm. Heard anything from Prompto?"

"Still down by Hammerhead."

"Heard he tried to take an iron giant on his own. Boy's got a death wish."

"Some days are better than others," Ignis replies. "He's alive. That's all that matters."

Gladio is relaxed today, with no time limit on rest and no chime in his pocket alerting him to some emergency or other; he has mellowed, Ignis thinks, whether by the weight of the long night or the passage of time. Later they walk through Lestallum's streets, which are gradually emptying as the night wears on; Ignis points out the changes in the cityscape, subdivided into functional areas to best distribute resources and conserve space.

Ignis asks about the girl Gladio had mentioned in his last letter and Gladio says they split a month ago when she transferred sections, cuts Ignis' muttered apology short. "It's fine. People come and go. Not a lot of forevers to promise when the world's like this." Gladio's not sure how big the Kingsglaive is now, exactly, but the Marshal is still recruiting, and people gets shuffled from section to section all the time. Wherever they're needed.

It's not a great life, but it is a life, and Ignis thinks Gladio has worked hard to have it.

They're walking in step, their shoulders brush. Ignis remembers going this way before; their second night in Lestallum, in search of food after a long day's hunting, Prompto running ahead while Noct stopped to check a flyer abandoned on a table. That evening the city lights had blotted out the stars from the sky, EXINERIS' roof a beacon of crystal blue in the velvet night.

"Ignis?"

"Hm?"

"Are you doing better on your own?"

"I get along," he says. "As we all do. Why?"

"You know, that day, when I left," Gladio says. "I thought maybe you wanted me out of your hair."

"You implied you'd stay for my sake."

"I would have."

Ignis hears in it the echo of his own voice, saying to Noct _we will stand with you always and help you bear your burdens_. That room, Ignis remembers, had a window with a view overlooking the Altissian ocean, infinite shimmering blue. "You have no responsibilities to me."

A pause, then Gladio replies, "We're friends, aren't we?"

After Altissia, in a haven in a murky swamp a mile underground, Gladio had pulled Ignis aside and issued him an ultimatum: in no way must Ignis' injury be allowed to compromise Noct's mission, and Gladio also trusted Ignis to make that call for himself. _The king's adviser and the king's shield must always be able to trust and rely on each other._ Ignis has always known this, but in that moment he had been sure of it.

Now Gladio's hand is rough and warm as he reaches up to gently brush the hair from Ignis' forehead. Since the world went to hell Ignis had given up styling his hair properly, and now he does just enough to keep it out of his face. Ignis tilts his head back beneath the touch as Gladio's fingers run through the strands, down the side of Ignis' face to rest in the hollow of his throat. His exhale is warm against Ignis' cheek as he catches under Ignis' chin and lifts, as if trying to meet Ignis' eyes, and Ignis lets himself be led, then surges up to close the distance between them. Gladio's lips are soft and warm and Ignis chases the taste of cheap beer with his tongue; his fingers find Gladio's forehead, search the cartography of his face. Gladio has changed his hair, let it grow out and then pulled it back. Makes Ignis wonder if Noct will still recognize them when he returns.

They pull apart for breath and Ignis whispers into Gladio's shoulder, "I never finished telling you, did I? What happened in Altissia."

Gladio's reply is a low rumble in his chest. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

"It's a long story."

"Got nothing but time."

Prompto and Gladio know the perfunctory sequence of events: back in Altissia Ignis had had just enough time to relay that he had sustained his injuries fighting the Accursed before something crashing to the floor the next room over indicated that Noct had regained consciousness. Everything else had fallen by the wayside after that, and neither of them had pressed, for which Ignis had been glad. Since that time Ignis has never thought he would give it voice again, let alone leaning against a wall in a deserted alleyway by Lestallum's power plant as the night wears on.

So he tells Gladio about Ravus Nox Fleuret, and Ardyn Izunia, and that the Ring had lain on the stone between Noct's hands and Ignis' own, just within reach. His breath catches as he inhales, the words do not come for a long time. "-- I used it. The Kings of Yore granted me just enough strength to hold him off for a time, and as the price they took my sight."

A long silence. "I guessed it might be something like that," Gladio says quietly.

"How?"

Gladio's fingers slip from Ignis' temple to the frame of his visor, then the mass of scar tissue beneath. "Been around a lot of burns. Something like this doesn't come from fire, elemancy or not." A pause, an indrawn breath. "Gods, Ignis."

Now there are years and a dark ocean between Ignis and Altissia, but in the telling he could still see Noct's clothes heavy with sea spray, Ravus falling to his knees on the crumbling stone, haloed by lightning from the storming sky above. People say that imprinted on the retinas of dead people is the last thing they saw in life. For Ignis that is still the image of Noct lying on the sacrificial altar as it crumbled into the sea, eyes closed as if he were only sleeping.

He always was so very hard to wake.

"I miss him," Ignis says, to nothing in particular.

"I know." A pause. "I do, too." Gladio's arms wrap Ignis like a vise; Ignis has rarely sought comfort in touch, but now it warms him. Gladio is a shield without a king, just as Ignis is a chamberlain without a lord, and they only have to hold the whole world together at the seams until Noct returns. "Hey, Iggy. How long d'you think it'll take him to wake up?"

"More than five alarms, certainly."

"For sure." Gladio laughs, a warm exhale against the side of Ignis' face. Once, Lestallum's night air had been warm and laced with the scent of roadside stall food of questionable hygiene. Now there is only the calling of insects to flavour it, alongside the faint dust from the trucks along the highway. "Well," Gladio says. "I'd best get back."

The Guard convoy are bunking in on the main floor of what used to be a shophouse, half the city away. The air has grown heavy with the promise of rain, and a rumble of thunder sounds in the distance. "My place is close by," Ignis says. "You could stay, so you don't have to make the trek all the way back up."

"Will your housemates mind?"

Ignis thinks. "No, they won't."

So Gladio does.


End file.
